Chapter II: Part 2

The respect shown to the priesthood as a body is marvellous, in view of the profligate lives of many. The general progress of the age has forced most of the dissolute priests into hypocrisy. But their cynical immorality is still the bane of many families. And it needs but a glance at the vile manual of confession, called the Golden Key, the author of which is the too well known Padre Claret, confessor to the queen, to see the systematic moral poisoning the minds of Spanish women must undergo who pay due attention to what is called their religious duties. If a confessor obeys the injunctions of this high ecclesiastical authority, his fair penitents will have nothing to learn from a diligent perusal of Faublas or Casanova. It would, however, be unjust to the priesthood to consider them all as corrupt as royal chaplains. It requires a combination of convent and palace life to produce these finished specimens of mitred infamy.

It is to be regretted that the Spanish women are kept in such systematic ignorance. They have a quicker and more active intelligence than the men. With a fair degree of education, much might be hoped from them in the intellectual development of the country. In society, you will at once be struck with the superiority of the women to their husbands and brothers in cleverness and appreciation. Among small tradesmen, the wife always comes to the rescue of her slow spouse when she sees him befogged in a bargain. In the fields, you ask a peasant some question about your journey. He will hesitate, and stammer, and end with, "_Quien sabe?"_ but his wife will answer with glib completeness all you want to know. I can imagine no cause for this, unless it be that the men cloud their brains all day with the fumes of tobacco, and the women do not.

The personality of the woman is not so entirely merged in that of the husband as among us. She retains her own baptismal and family name through life. If Miss Matilda Smith marries Mr. Jonathan Jones, all vestige of the former gentle being vanishes at once from the earth, and Mrs. Jonathan Jones alone remains. But in Spain she would become Mrs. Matilda Smith de Jones, and her eldest-born would be called Don Juan Jones y Smith. You ask the name of a married lady in society, and you hear as often her own name as that of her husband.

Even among titled people, the family name seems more highly valued than the titular designation. Everybody knows Narvaez, but how few have heard of the Duke of Valencia! The Regent Serrano has a name known and honored over the world, but most people must think twice before they remember the Duke de la Torre. Juan Prim is better known than the Marques de los Castillejos ever will be. It is perhaps due to the prodigality with which titles have been scattered in late years that the older titles are more regarded than the new, although of inferior grade. Thus Prim calls himself almost invariably the Conde de Reus, though his grandeeship came with his investiture as marquis.

There is something quite noticeable about this easy way of treating one's name. We are accustomed to think a man can have but one name, and can sign it but in one way. Lord Derby can no more call himself Mr. Stanley than President Grant can sign a bill as U. Simpson. Yet both these signatures would be perfectly valid according to Spanish analogy. The Marquis of Santa Marta signs himself Guzman; the Marquis of Albaida uses no signature but Orense; both of these gentlemen being Republican deputies. I have seen General Prim's name signed officially, Conde de Reus, Marques de los Castillejos, Prim, J. Prim, Juan Prim, and Jean Prim, changing the style as often as the humor strikes him.

Their forms of courtesy are, however, invariable. You can never visit a Spaniard without his informing you that you are in your own house. If, walking with him, you pass his residence, he asks you to enter your house and unfatigue yourself a moment. If you happen upon any Spaniard, of whatever class, at the hour of repast, he always offers you his dinner; if you decline, it must be with polite wishes for his digestion. With the Spaniards, no news is good news; it is therefore civil to ask a Spaniard if his lady-wife goes on without novelty, and to express your profound gratification on being assured that she does. Their forms of hospitality are evidently Moorish, derived from the genuine open hand and open tent of the children of the desert; now nothing is left of them but grave and decorous words. In the old times, one who would have refused such offers would have been held a churl; now one who would accept them would be regarded as a boor.

There is still something primitive about the Spanish servants. A flavor of the old romances and the old comedy still hangs about them. They are chatty and confidential to a degree that appalls a stiff and formal Englishman of the upper middle class. The British servant is a chilly and statuesque image of propriety. The French is an intelligent and sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian, and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of intentional disrespect. The Castilian grandee does not regard his dignity as in danger from a moment's chat with a waiter. He has no conception of that ferocious decorum we Anglo-Saxons require from our manservants and our maidservants. The Spanish servant seems to regard it as part of his duty to keep your spirits gently excited while you dine by the gossip of the day. He joins also in your discussions, whether they touch lightly on the politics of the hour or plunge profoundly into the depths of philosophic research. He laughs at your wit, and swings his napkin with convulsions of mirth at your good stories. He tells you the history of his life while you are breaking your egg, and lays the story of his loves before you with your coffee. Yet he is not intrusive. He will chatter on without waiting for a reply, and when you are tired of him you can shut him off with a word. There are few Spanish servants so uninteresting but that you can find in them from time to time some sparks of that ineffable light which shines forever in Sancho and Figaro.

The traditions of subordination, which are the result of long centuries of tyranny, have prevented the development of that feeling of independence among the lower orders, which in a freer race finds its expression in ill manners and discourtesy to superiors. I knew a gentleman in the West whose circumstances had forced him to become a waiter in a backwoods restaurant. He bore a deadly grudge at the profession that kept him from starving, and asserted his unconquered nobility of soul by scowling at his customers and swearing at the viands he dispensed. I remember the deep sense of wrong with which he would growl, "Two buckwheats, begawd!" You see nothing of this defiant spirit in Spanish servants. They are heartily glad to find employment, and ask no higher good-fortune than to serve acceptably. As to drawing comparisons between themselves and their masters, they never seem to think they belong to the same race. I saw a pretty grisette once stop to look at a show-window where there was a lay-figure completely covered with all manner of trusses. She gazed at it long and earnestly, evidently thinking it was some new fashion just introduced into the gay world. At last she tripped away with all the grace of her unfettered limbs, saying, "If the fine ladies have to wear all those machines, I am glad I am not made like them."

Whether it be from their more regular and active lives, or from their being unable to pay for medical attendance, the poorer classes suffer less from sickness than their betters. An ordinary Spaniard is sick but once in his life, and that once is enough,--'twill serve. The traditions of the old satires which represented the doctor and death as always hunting in couples still survive in Spain. It is taken as so entirely a matter of course that a patient must die that the law of the land imposed a heavy fine upon physicians who did not bring a priest on their second visit. His labor of exhortation and confession was rarely wasted. There were few sufferers who recovered from the shock of that solemn ceremony in their chambers. Medical science still labors in Spain under the ban of ostracism, imposed in the days when all research was impiety. The Inquisition clamored for the blood of Vesalius, who had committed the crime of a demonstration in anatomy. He was forced into a pilgrimage of expiation, and died on the way to Palestine. The Church has always looked with a jealous eye upon the inquirers, the innovators. Why these probes, these lancets, these multifarious drugs, when the object in view could be so much more easily obtained by the judicious application of masses and prayers?

So it has come about that the doctor is a Pariah, and miracles flourish in the Peninsula. At every considerable shrine you will see the walls covered with waxen models of feet, legs, hands, and arms secured by the miraculous interposition of the _genius loci,_ and scores of little crutches attesting the marvellous hour when they became useless. Each shrine, like a mineral spring, has its own especial virtue. A Santiago medal was better than quinine for ague. St. Veronica's handkerchief is sovereign for sore eyes. A bone of St. Magin supersedes the use of mercury. A finger-nail of San Frutos cured at Segovia a case of congenital idiocy. The Virgin of Ona acted as a vermifuge on royal infantas, and her girdle at Tortosa smooths their passage into this world. In this age of unfaith relics have lost much of their power. They turn out their score or so of miracles every feast-day, it is true, but are no longer capable of the _tours de force_ of earlier days. Cardinal de Retz saw with his eyes a man whose wooden legs were turned to capering flesh and blood by the image of the Pillar of Saragossa. But this was in the good old times before newspapers and telegraphs had come to dispel the twilight of belief.

Now, it is excessively probable that neither doctor nor priest can do much if the patient is hit in earnest. He soon succumbs, and is laid out in his best clothes in an improvised chapel and duly sped on his way. The custom of burying the dead in the gown and cowl of monks has greatly passed into disuse. The mortal relics are treated with growing contempt, as the superstitions of the people gradually lose their concrete character. The soul is the important matter which the Church now looks to. So the cold clay is carted off to the cemetery with small ceremony. Even the coffins of the rich are jammed away into receptacles too small for them, and hastily plastered out of sight. The poor are carried off on trestles and huddled into their nameless graves, without following or blessing. Children are buried with some regard to the old Oriental customs. The coffin is of some gay and cheerful color, pink or blue, and is carried open to the grave by four of the dead child's young companions, a fifth walking behind with the ribboned coffin-lid. I have often seen these touching little parties moving through the bustling streets, the peaceful small face asleep under the open sky, decked with the fading roses and withering lilies. In all well-to-do families the house of death is deserted immediately after the funeral. The stricken ones retire to some other habitation, and there pass eight days in strict and inviolable seclusion. On the ninth day the great masses for the repose of the soul of the departed are said in the parish church, and all the friends of the family are expected to be present. These masses are the most important and expensive incident of the funeral. They cost from two hundred to one thousand dollars, according to the strength and fervor of the orisons employed. They are repeated several years on the anniversary of the decease, and afford a most sure and nourishing revenue to the Church. They are founded upon those feelings inseparable from every human heart, vanity and affection. Our dead friends must be as well prayed for as those of others, and who knows but that they may be in deadly need of prayers! To shorten their fiery penance by one hour, who would not fast for a week? On these anniversaries a black-bordered advertisement appears in the newspapers, headed by the sign of the cross and the Requiescat in Pace, announcing that on this day twelve months Don Fulano de Tal passed from earth garnished with the holy sacraments, that all the masses this day celebrated in such and such churches will be applied to the benefit of his spirit's repose, and that all Christian friends are hereby requested to commend his soul this day unto God. These efforts, if they do the dead no good, at least do the living no harm.

A luxury of grief, in those who can afford it, consists in shutting up the house where a death has taken place and never suffering it to be opened again. I once saw a beautiful house and wide garden thus abandoned in one of the most fashionable streets of Madrid. I inquired about it, and found it was formerly the residence of the Duke of------. His wife had died there many years before, and since that day not a door nor a window had been opened. The garden gates were red and rough with rust. Grass grew tall and rank in the gravelled walks. A thick lush undergrowth had overrun the flower-beds and the lawns. The blinds were rotting over the darkened windows. Luxuriant vines clambered over all the mossy doors. The stucco was peeling from the walls in unwholesome blotches. Wild birds sang all day in the safe solitude. There was something impressive in this spot of mould and silence, lying there so green and implacable in the very heart of a great and noisy city. The duke lived in Paris, leading the rattling life of a man of the world. He never would sell or let that Madrid house. Perhaps in his heart also, that battered thoroughfare worn by the pattering boots of Ma-bine and the Bois, and the Quartier Breda, there was a green spot sacred to memory and silence, where no footfall should ever light, where no living voice should ever be heard, shut out from the world and its cares and its pleasures, where through the gloom of dead days he could catch a glimpse of a white hand, a flash of a dark eye, the rustle of a trailing robe, and feel sweeping over him the old magic of love's young dream, softening his fancy to tender regret and his eyes to a happy mist--

"Like that which kept the heart of Eden green
Before the useful trouble of the rain."

INFLUENCE OF TRADITION IN SPANISH LIFE

Intelligent Spaniards with whom I have conversed on political matters have often exclaimed, "Ah, you Americans are happy! you have no traditions." The phrase was at first a puzzling one. We Americans are apt to think we have traditions,--a rather clearly marked line of precedents. And it is hard to see how a people should be happier without them. It is not anywhere considered a misfortune to have had a grandfather, I believe, and some very good folks take an innocent pride in that very natural fact. It was not easy to conceive why the possession of a glorious history of many centuries should be regarded as a drawback. But a closer observation of Spanish life and thought reveals the curious and hurtful effect of tradition upon every phase of existence.

In the commonest events of every day you will find the flavor of past ages lingering in petty annoyances. The insecurity of the middle ages has left as a legacy to our times a complicated system of obstacles to a man getting into his own house at night. I lived in a pleasant house on the Prado, with a minute garden in front, and an iron gate and railing. This gate was shut and locked by the night watchman of the quarter at midnight,--so conscientiously that he usually had everything snug by half past eleven. As the same man had charge of a dozen or more houses, it was scarcely reasonable to expect him to be always at your own gate when you arrived. But by a singular fatality I think no man ever found him in sight at any hour. He is always opening some other gate or shutting some other door, or settling the affairs of the nation with a friend in the next block, or carrying on a chronic courtship at the lattice of some olive-cheeked soubrette around the corner. Be that as it may, no one ever found him on hand; and there is nothing to do but to sit down on the curbstone and lift up your voice and shriek for him until he comes. At two o'clock of a morning in January the exercise is not improving to the larynx or the temper. There is a tradition in the very name of this worthy. He is called the Sereno, because a century or so ago he used to call the hour and the state of the weather, and as the sky is almost always cloudless here, he got the name of the Sereno, as the quail is called Bob White, from much iteration. The Sereno opens your gate and the door of your house. When you come to your own floor you must ring, and your servant takes a careful survey of you through a latticed peep-hole before he will let you in. You may positively forbid this every day in the year, but the force of habit is too strong in the Spanish mind to suffer amendment.

This absurd custom comes evidently down from a time of great lawlessness and license, when no houses were secure without these precautions, when people rarely stirred from their doors after nightfall, and when a door was never opened to a stranger. Now, when no such dangers exist, the annoying and senseless habit still remains, because no one dreams of changing anything which their fathers thought proper. Three hundred thousand people in Madrid submit year after year to this nightly cross, and I have never heard a voice raised in protest, nor even in defence of the custom.

There is often a bitterness of opposition to evident improvement which is hard to explain. In the last century, when the eminent naturalist Bowles went down to the Almaden silver-mines, by appointment of the government, to see what was the cause of their exhaustion, he found that they had been worked entirely in perpendicular shafts instead of following the direction of the veins. He perfected a plan for working them in this simple and reasonable way, and no earthly power could make the Spanish miners obey his orders. There was no precedent for this new process, and they would not touch it. They preferred starvation rather than offend the memory of their fathers by a change. At last they had to be dismissed and a full force imported from Germany, under whose hands the mines became instantly enormously productive.

I once asked a very intelligent English contractor why he used no wheelbarrows in his work. He had some hundreds of stalwart navvies employed carrying dirt in small wicker baskets to an embankment. He said the men would not use them. Some said it broke their backs. Others discovered a capital way of amusing themselves by putting the barrow on their heads and whirling the wheel as rapidly as possible with their hands. This was a game which never grew stale. The contractor gave up in despair, and went back to the baskets. But it is in the official regions that tradition is most powerful. In the budget of 1870 there was a curious chapter called "Charges of Justice." This consisted of a collection of articles appropriating large sums of money for the payment of feudal taxes to the great aristocracy of the kingdom as a compensation for long extinct seigniories. The Duke of Rivas got thirteen hundred dollars for carrying the mail to Victoria. The Duke of San Carlos draws ten thousand dollars for carrying the royal correspondence to the Indies. Of course this service ceased to belong to these families some centuries ago, but the salary is still paid. The Duke of Almodovar is well paid for supplying the _baton_ of office to the Alguazil of Cordova. The Duke of Osuna--one of the greatest grandees of the kingdom, a gentleman who has the right to wear seventeen hats in the presence of the Queen--receives fifty thousand dollars a year for imaginary feudal services. The Count of Altamira, who, as his name indicates, is a gentleman of high views, receives as a salve for the suppression of his fief thirty thousand dollars a year. In consideration of this sum he surrenders, while it is punctually paid, the privilege of hanging his neighbors.

When the budget was discussed, a Republican member gently criticised this chapter; but his amendment for an investigation of these charges was indignantly rejected. He was accused of a shocking want of Espanolismo. He was thought to have no feeling in his heart for the glories of Spain. The respectability of the Chamber could find but one word injurious enough to express their contempt for so shameless a proposition; they said it was little better than socialism. The "charges" were all voted. Spain, tottering on the perilous verge of bankruptcy, her schoolmasters not paid for months, her sinking fund plundered, her credit gone out of sight, borrowing every cent she spends at thirty per cent., is proud of the privilege of paying into the hands of her richest and most useless class this gratuity of twelve million reals simply because they are descended from the robber chiefs of the darker ages. There is a curious little comedy played by the family of Medina Celi at every new coronation of a king of Spain. The duke claims to be the rightful heir to the throne. He is descended from Prince Ferdinand, who, dying before his father, Don Alonso X., left his babies exposed to the cruel kindness of their uncle Sancho, who, to save them the troubles of the throne, assumed it himself and transmitted it to his children,--all this some half dozen centuries ago. At every coronation the duke formally protests; an athletic and sinister-looking court headsman comes down to his palace in the Carrera San Geronimo, and by threats of immediate decapitation induces the duke to sign a paper abdicating his rights to the throne of all the Spains. The duke eats the Bourbon leek with inward profanity, and feels that he has done a most clever and proper thing. This performance is apparently his only object and mission in life. This one sacrifice to tradition is what he is born for.

The most important part of a Spaniard's signature is the _rubrica_ or flourish with which it closes. The monarch's hand is set to public acts exclusively by this _parafe._ This evidently dates from the time when none but priests could write. In Madrid the mule-teams are driven tandem through the wide streets, because this was necessary in the ages when the streets were narrow.

There is even a show of argument sometimes to justify an adherence to things as they are. About a century ago there was an effort made by people who had lived abroad, and so become conscious of the possession of noses, to have the streets of Madrid cleaned. The proposition was at first received with apathetic contempt, but when the innovators persevered they met the earnest and successful opposition of all classes. The Cas-tilian _savans_ gravely reported that the air of Madrid, which blew down from the snowy Guadarra-mas, was so thin and piercing that it absolutely needed the gentle corrective of the ordure-heaps to make it fit for human lungs.

There is no nation in Europe in which so little washing is done. I do not think it is because the Spaniards do not want to be neat. They are, on the whole, the best-dressed people on the Continent. The hate of ablutions descends from those centuries of warfare with the Moors. The heathens washed themselves daily; therefore a Christian should not. The monks, who were too lazy to bathe, taught their followers to be filthy by precept and example. Water was never to be applied externally except in baptism. It was a treacherous element, and dallying with it had gotten Bathsheba and Susanna into no end of trouble. So when the cleanly infidels were driven out of Granada, the pious and hydrophobic Cardinal Ximenez persuaded the Catholic sovereigns to destroy the abomination of baths they left behind. Until very recently the Spanish mind has been unable to separate a certain idea of immorality from bathing. When Madame Daunoy, one of the sprightliest of observers, visited the court of Philip IV., she found it was considered shocking among the ladies of the best society to wash the face and hands. Once or twice a week they would glaze their pretty visages with the white of an egg. Of late years this prejudice has given way somewhat; but it has lasted longer than any monument in Spain.

These, however, are but trivial manifestations of that power of tradition which holds the Spanish intellect imprisoned as in a vice of iron. The whole life of the nation is fatally influenced by this blind reverence for things that have been. It may be said that by force of tradition Christian morality has been driven from individual life by religion, and honesty has been supplanted as a rule of public conduct by honor,--a wretched substitute in either case, and irreconcilably at war with the spirit of the age.

The growth of this double fanaticism is easily explained; it is the result of centuries of religious wars. From the hour when Pelayo, the first of the Asturian kings, successfully met and repulsed the hitherto victorious Moors in his rocky fortress of Covadonga, to the day when Boabdil the Unlucky saw for the last time through streaming tears the vermilion towers of Alhambra crowned with the banner of the cross, there was not a year of peace in Spain. No other nation has had such an experience. Seven centuries of constant warfare, with three thousand battles; this is the startling epitome of Spanish history from the Mahometan conquest to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. In this vast war there was laid the foundation of the national character of to-day.

Even before the conquering Moslem crossed from Africa, Spain was the most deeply religious country in Europe; and by this I mean the country in which the Church was most powerful in its relations with the State. When the Council of Toledo, in 633, received the king of Castile, he fell on his face at the feet of the bishops before venturing to address them. When the hosts of Islam had overspread the Peninsula, and the last remnant of Christianity had taken refuge in the inaccessible hills of the northwest, the richest possession they carried into these inviolate fastnesses was a chest of relics,--knuckle-bones of apostles and splinters of true crosses, in which they trusted more than in mortal arms. The Church had thus a favorable material to work upon in the years of struggle that followed. The circumstances all lent themselves to the scheme of spiritual domination. The fight was for the cross against the crescent; the symbol of the quarrel was visible and tangible. The Spaniards were poor and ignorant and credulous. The priests were enough superior to lead and guide them, and not so far above them as to be out of the reach of their sympathies and their love. They marched with them. They shared their toils and dangers. They stimulated their hate of the enemy. They taught them that their cruel anger was the holy wrath of God. They held the keys of eternal weal or woe, and rewarded subservience to the priestly power with promises of everlasting felicity; while the least symptom of rebellion in thought or action was punished with swift death and the doom of endless flames. There was nothing in the Church which the fighting Spaniard could recognize as a reproach to himself. It was as bitter, as brave, as fierce, and revengeful as he. His credulity regarded it as divine, and worthy of blind adoration, and his heart went out to it with the sympathy of perfect love.

In these centuries of war there was no commerce, no manufactures, no settled industry of importance among the Spaniards. There was consequently no wealth, none of that comfort and ease which is the natural element of doubt and discussion. Science did not exist. The little learning of the time was exclusively in the hands of the priesthood. If from time to time an intelligent spirit struggled against the chain of unquestioning bigotry that bound him, he was rigorously silenced by prompt and bloody punishment. There seemed to be no need of discussion, no need of inculcation of doctrine. The serious work of the time was the war with the infidel. The clergy managed everything. The question, "What shall I do to be saved?" never entered into those simple and ignorant minds. The Church would take care of those who did her bidding.

Thus it was that in the hammering of those struggling ages the nation became welded together in one compact mass of unquestioning, unreasoning faith, which the Church could manage at its own good pleasure.

It was also in these times that Spanish honor took its rise. This sentiment is so nearly connected with that of personal loyalty that they may be regarded as phases of the same monarchical spirit. The rule of honor as distinguished from honesty and virtue is the most prominent characteristic of monarchy, and for that reason the political theorists from the time of Montesquieu have pronounced in favor of the monarchy as a more practicable form of government than the republic, as requiring a less perfect and delicate machinery, men of honor being far more common than men of virtue. As in Spain, owing to special conditions, monarchy attained the most perfect growth and development which the world has seen, the sentiment of honor, as a rule of personal and political action, has there reached its most exaggerated form. I use this word, of course, in its restricted meaning of an intense sense of personal dignity, and readiness to sacrifice for this all considerations of interest and morality.

This phase of the Spanish character is probably derived in its germ from the Gothic blood of their ancestors. Their intense self-assertion has been, in the Northern races, modified by the progress of intelligence and the restraints of municipal law into a spirit of sturdy self-respect and a disinclination to submit to wrong. The Goths of Spain have unfortunately never gone through this civilizing process. Their endless wars never gave an opportunity for the development of the purely civic virtues of respect and obedience to law. The people at large were too wretched, too harried by constant coming and going of the waves of war, to do more than live, in a shiftless, hand-to-mouth way, from the proceeds of their flocks and herds. There were no cities of importance within the Spanish lines. There was no opportunity for the growth of the true burgher spirit.

There was no law to speak of in all these years except the twin despotism of the Church and the king. If there had been dissidence between them it might have been better for the people. But up to late years there has never been a quarrel between the clergy and the crown. Their interests were so identified that the dual tyranny was stronger than even a single one could have been. The crown always lending to the Church when necessary the arm of flesh, and the Church giving to the despotism of the sceptre the sanction of spiritual authority, an absolute power was established over body and soul.

The spirit of individual independence inseparable from Gothic blood being thus forced out of its natural channels of freedom of thought and municipal liberty, it remained in the cavaliers of the army of Spain in the same barbarous form which it had held in the Northern forests,--a physical self-esteem and a readiness to fight on the slightest provocation. This did not interfere with the designs of the Church and was rather a useful engine against its enemies. The absolute power of the crown kept the spirit of feudal arrogance in check while the pressure of a common danger existed. The close cohesion which was so necessary in camp and Church prevented the tendency to disintegration, while the right of life and death was freely exercised by the great lords on their distant estates without interference. The predominating power of the crown was too great and too absolute to result in the establishment of any fixed principle of obedience to law. The union of crozier and sceptre had been, if anything, too successful. The king was so far above the nobility that there was no virtue in obeying him. His commission was divine, and he was no more confined by human laws than the stars and the comets. The obedience they owed and paid him was not respect to law. It partook of the character of religious worship, and left untouched and untamed in their savage hearts the instinct of resistance to all earthly claims of authority.

Such was the condition of the public spirit of Spain at the beginning of that wonderful series of reigns from Ferdinand and Isabella to their great-grandson Philip II., which in less than a century raised Spain to the summit of greatness and built up a realm on which the sun never set. All the events of these prodigious reigns contributed to increase and intensify the national traits to which we have referred. The discovery of America flooded Europe with gold, and making the better class of Spaniards the richest people in the world naturally heightened their pride and arrogance. The long and eventful religious wars of Charles V. and Philip II. gave employment and distinction to thousands of families whose vanity was nursed by the royal favor, and whose ferocious self-will was fed and pampered by the blood of heretics and the spoil of rebels.

The national qualities of superstition and pride made the whole cavalier class a wieldy and effective weapon in the hands of the monarch, and the use he made of them reacted upon these very traits, intensifying and affirming them.

So terrible was this absolute command of the spiritual and physical forces of the kingdom possessed by the monarchs of that day, that when the Reformation flashed out, a beacon in the northern sky of political and religious freedom to the world, its light could not penetrate into Spain. There was a momentary struggle there, it is true. But so apathetic was the popular mind that the effort to bring it into sympathy with the vast movement of the age was hopeless from the beginning. The axe and the fagot made rapid work of the heresy. After only ten years of burnings and beheadings Philip II. could boast that not a heretic lived in his borders.

Crazed by his success and his unquestioned omnipotence at home, and drunken with the delirious dream that God's wrath was breathing through him upon a revolted world, he essayed to crush heresy throughout Europe; and in this mad and awful crime his people undoubtingly seconded him. In this he failed, the stars in their courses fighting against him, the God that his worship slandered taking sides against him. But history records what rivers of blood he shed in the long and desperate fight, and how lovingly and adoringly his people sustained him. He killed, in cold blood, some forty thousand harmless people for their faith, besides the vastly greater number whose lives he took in battle.

Yet this horrible monster, who is blackened with every crime at which humanity shudders, who had no grace of manhood, no touch of humanity, no gleam of sympathy which could redeem the gloomy picture of his ravening life, was beloved and worshipped as few men have been since the world has stood. The common people mourned him at his death with genuine unpaid sobs and tears. They will weep even yet at the story of his edifying death,--this monkish vampire breathing his last with his eyes fixed on the cross of the mild Nazarene, and tormented with impish doubts as to whether he had drunk blood enough to fit him for the company of the just!

His successors rapidly fooled away the stupendous empire that had filled the sixteenth century with its glory. Spain sank from the position of ruler of the world and queen of the seas to the place of a second-rate power, by reason of the weakening power of superstition and bad government, and because the people and the chieftains had never learned the lesson of law.

The clergy lost no tittle of their power. They went on, gayly roasting their heretics and devouring the substance of the people, more prosperous than ever in those days of national decadence. Philip III. gave up the government entirely to the Duke of Lerma, who formed an alliance with the Church, and they led together a joyous life. In the succeeding reign the Church had become such a gnawing cancer upon the state that the servile Cortes had the pluck to protest against its inroads. There were in 1626 nine thousand monasteries for men, besides nunneries. There were thirty-two thousand Dominican and Franciscan friars. In the diocese of Seville alone there were fourteen thousand chaplains. There was a panic in the land. Every one was rushing to get into holy orders. The Church had all the bread. Men must be monks or starve. _Zelus domus tuae come-dit me,_ writes the British ambassador, detailing these facts.

We must remember that this was the age when the vast modern movement of inquiry and investigation was beginning. Bacon was laying in England the foundations of philosophy, casting with his prophetic intelligence the horoscope of unborn sciences. Descartes was opening new vistas of thought to the world. But in Spain, while the greatest names of her literature occur at this time, they aimed at no higher object than to amuse their betters. Cervantes wrote Quixote, but he died in a monk's hood; and Lope de Vega was a familiar of the Inquisition. The sad story of the mind of Spain in this momentous period may be written in one word,--everybody believed and nobody inquired.

The country sank fast into famine and anarchy. The madness of the monks and the folly of the king expelled the Moors in 1609, and the loss of a million of the best mechanics and farmers of Spain struck the nation with a torpor like that of death. In 1650 Sir Edward Hyde wrote that "affairs were in huge disorder." People murdered each other for a loaf of bread. The marine perished for want of sailors. In the stricken land nothing flourished but the rabble of monks and the royal authority.

This is the curious fact. The Church and the Crown had brought them to this misery, yet better than their lives the Spaniards loved the Church and the Crown. A word against either would have cost any man his life in those days. The old alliance still hung together firmly. The Church bullied and dragooned the king in private, but it valued his despotic power too highly ever to slight it in public. There was something superhuman about the faith and veneration with which the people, and the aristocracy as well, regarded the person of the king. There was somewhat of gloomy and ferocious dignity about Philip II. which might easily bring a courtier to his knees; but how can we account for the equal reverence that was paid to the ninny Philip III., the debauched trifler Philip IV., and the drivelling idiot Charles II.?

Yet all of these were invested with the same attributes of the divine. Their hands, like those of Midas, had the gift of making anything they touched too precious for mortal use. A horse they had mounted could never be ridden again. A woman they had loved must enter a nunnery when they were tired of her.

When Buckingham came down to Spain with Charles of England, the Conde-Duque of Olivares was shocked and scandalized at the relation of confidential friendship that existed between the prince and the duke. The world never saw a prouder man than Olivares. His picture by Velazquez hangs side by side with that of his royal master in Madrid. You see at a glance that the count-duke is the better man physically, mentally, morally. But he never dreamed it. He thought in his inmost heart that the best thing about him was the favor of the worthless fribble whom he governed.

Through all the vicissitudes of Spanish history the force of these married superstitions--reverence for the Church as distinguished from the fear of God, and reverence for the king as distinguished from respect for law--have been the ruling characteristics of the Spanish mind. Among the fatal effects of this has been the extinction of rational piety and rational patriotism. If a man was not a good Catholic he was pretty sure to be an atheist. If he did not honor the king he was an outlaw. The wretched story of Spanish dissensions beyond seas, and the loss of the vast American empire, is distinctly traceable to the exaggerated sentiment of personal honor, unrestrained by the absolute authority of the crown. It seems impossible for the Spaniard of history and tradition to obey anything out of his sight. The American provinces have been lost one by one through petty quarrels and colonial rivalries. At the first word of dispute their notion of honor obliges them to fly to arms, and when blood has been shed reconciliation is impossible. So weak is the principle of territorial loyalty, that whenever the Peninsula government finds it necessary to overrule some violence of its own soldiers, these find no difficulty in marching over to the insurrection, or raising a fresh rebellion of their own. So little progress has there been in Spain from the middle ages to to-day in true political science, that we see such butchers as Caballero and Valmaseda repeating to-day the crimes and follies of Cortes and Pamfilo Narvaez, of Pizarro and Almagro, and the revolt of the bloodthirsty volunteers of the Havana is only a question of time.

It is true that in later years there has been the beginning of a better system of thought and discussion in Spain. But the old tradition still holds its own gallantly in Church and state. Nowhere in the world are the forms of religion so rigidly observed, and the precepts of Christian morality less regarded. The most facile beauties in Madrid are severe as Minervas on Holy Thursday. I have seen a dozen fast men at the door of a gambling-house fall on their knees in the dust as the Host passed by in the street. Yet the fair were no less frail and the senoritos were no less profligate for this unfeigned reverence for the outside of the cup and platter.

In the domain of politics there is still the lamentable disproportion between honor and honesty. A high functionary cares nothing if the whole Salon del Prado talks of his pilferings, but he will risk his life in an instant if you call him no gentleman. The word "honor" is still used in all legislative assemblies, even in England and America. But the idea has gone by the board in all democracies, and the word means no more than the chamberlain's sword or the speaker's mace. The only criterion which the statesman of the nineteenth century applies to public acts is that of expediency and legality. The first question is, "Is it lawful?" the second, "Does it pay?" Both of these are questions of fact, and as such susceptible of discussion and proof. The question of honor and religion carries us at once into the realm of sentiment where no demonstration is possible. But this is where every question is planted from the beginning in Spanish politics. Every public matter presents itself under this form: "Is it consistent with Spanish honor?" and "Will it be to the advantage of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church?" Now, nothing is consistent with Spanish honor which does not recognize the Spain of to-day as identical with the Spain of the sixteenth century, and the bankrupt government of Madrid as equal in authority to the world-wide autocracy of Charles V. And nothing is thought to be to the advantage of the Church which does not tend to the concubinage of the spiritual and temporal power, and to the muzzling of speech and the drugging of the mind to sleep.

Let any proposition be made which touches this traditional susceptibility of race, no matter how sensible or profitable it may be, and you hear in the Cortes and the press, and, louder than all, among the idle cavaliers of the _cafes,_ the wildest denunciations of the treason that would consent to look at things as they are. The men who have ventured to support the common-sense view are speedily stormed into silence or timid self-defence. The sword of Guzman is brandished in the Chambers, the name of Pelayo is invoked, the memory of the Cid is awakened, and the proposition goes out in a blaze of patriotic pyrotechnics, to the intense satisfaction of the unthinking and the grief of the judicious. The senoritos go back to the serious business of their lives--coffee and cigarettes--with a genuine glow of pride in a country which is capable of the noble self-sacrifice of cutting off its nose to spite somebody else's face.

But I repeat, the most favorable sign of the times is that this tyranny of tradition is losing its power. A great deal was done by the single act of driving out the queen. This was a blow at superstition which gave to the whole body politic a most salutary shock. Never before in Spain had a revolution been directed at the throne. Before it was always an obnoxious ministry that was to be driven out. The monarch remained; and the exiled outlaw of to-day might be premier to-morrow. But the fall of Novaliches at the Bridge of Alcolea decided the fate not only of the ministry but of the dynasty; and while General Concha was waiting for the train to leave Madrid, Isabel of Bourbon and Divine Right were passing the Pyrenees.

Although the moral power of the Church is still so great, the incorporation of freedom of worship in the constitution of 1869 has been followed by a really remarkable development of freedom of thought. The proposition was regarded by some with horror and by others with contempt. One of the most enlightened statesmen in Spain once said to me, "The provision for freedom of worship in the constitution is a mere abstract proposition,--it can never have any practical value except for foreigners. I cannot conceive of a Spaniard being anything but a Catholic." And so powerful was this impression in the minds of the deputies that the article only accords freedom of worship to foreigners in Spain, and adds, hypothetically, that if any Spaniards should profess any other religion than the Catholic, they are entitled to the same liberty as foreigners. The Inquisition has been dead half a century, but you can see how its ghost still haunts the official mind of Spain. It is touching to see how the broken links of the chain of superstition still hang about even those who imagine they are defying it. As in their Christian burials, following unwittingly the example of the hated Moors, they bear the corpse with uncovered face to the grave, and follow it with the funeral torch of the Romans, so the formula of the Church clings even to the mummery of the atheists. Not long ago in Madrid a man and woman who belonged to some fantastic order which rejected religion and law had a child born to them in the course of things, and determined that it should begin life free from the taint of superstition. It should not be christened, it should be named, in the Name of Reason. But they could not break loose from the idea of baptism. They poured a bottle of water on the shivering nape of the poor little neophyte, and its frail life went out in its first wheezing week.

But in spite of all this a spirit of religious inquiry is growing up in Spain, and the Church sees it and cannot prevent it. It watches the liberal newspapers and the Protestant prayer-meetings much as the old giant in Bunyan's dream glared at the passing pilgrims, mumbling and muttering toothless curses. It looks as if the dead sleep of uniformity of thought were to be broken at last, and Spain were to enter the healthful and vivifying atmosphere of controversy.

Symptoms of a similar change may be seen in the world of politics. The Republican party is only a year or two old, but what a vigorous and noisy infant it is! With all its faults and errors, it seems to have the promise of a sturdy and wholesome future. It refuses to be bound by the memories of the past, but keeps its eyes fixed on the brighter possibilities to come. Its journals, undeterred by the sword of Guzman or the honor of all the Caballeros,--the men on horseback,--are advocating such sensible measures as justice to the Antilles, and the sale of outlying property, which costs more than it produces. Emilio Castelar, casting behind him all the restraints of tradition, announces as his idea of liberty "the right of all citizens to obey nothing but the law." There is no sounder doctrine than this preached in Manchester or Boston. If the Spanish people can be brought to see that God is greater than the Church, and that the law is above the king, the day of final deliverance is at hand.

TAUROMACHY

The bull-fight is the national festival of Spain. The rigid Britons have had their fling at it for many years. The effeminate _badaud_ of Paris has declaimed against its barbarity. Even the aristocracy of Spain has begun to suspect it of vulgarity and to withdraw from the arena the light of its noble countenance. But the Spanish people still hold it to their hearts and refuse to be weaned from it.

"As Panem et Circenses was the cry Among the Roman populace of old, So Pan y Toros is the cry in Spain."

It is a tradition which has passed into their national existence. They received it from nowhere. They have transmitted it nowhither except to their own colonies. In late years an effort has been made to transplant it, but with small success. There were a few bull-fights four years ago at Havre. There was a sensation of curiosity which soon died away. This year in London the experiment was tried, but was hooted out of existence, to the great displeasure of the Spanish journals, who said the ferocious Islanders would doubtless greatly prefer baiting to death a half dozen Irish serfs from the estate of Lord Fritters,--a gentle diversion in which we are led to believe the British peers pass their leisure hours.

It is this monopoly of the bull-fight which so endears it to the Spanish heart. It is to them conclusive proof of the vast superiority of both the human and taurine species in Spain. The eminent torero, Pepe Illo, said: "The love of bulls is inherent in man, especially in the Spaniard, among which glorious people there have been bull-fights ever since bulls were, because," adds Pepe, with that modesty which forms so charming a trait of the Iberian character, "the Spanish men are as much more brave than all other men, as the Spanish bull is more savage and valiant than all other bulls."

The sport permeates the national life. I have seen it woven into the tapestry of palaces, and rudely stamped on the handkerchief of the peasant. It is the favorite game of children in the street. Loyal Spain was thrilled with joy recently on reading in its Paris correspondence that when the exiled Prince of Asturias went for a half-holiday to visit his imperial comrade at the Tuileries, the urchins had a game of "toro" on the terrace, admirably conducted by the little Bourbon and followed up with great spirit by the little Montijo-Bonaparte.