Castilian Days

Part 1

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

LIST OF 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."

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