IVHIS FOIBLES AND FINENESSES
“The salient trait of the Spanish character,” says Taine, “is a lack of the sense of the practical.” For want of it, Ferdinand and Isabella themselves—the greatest rulers Spain ever had—drove the Moors and the Jews out of the country; and laid the cornerstone of its ruin. Far from realizing they were expelling by the hundred thousand their most wealthy and intelligent subjects, the Catholic sovereigns saw only the immediate religious triumph; the immediate financial gain of confiscating the estates of the infidels, and refusing to harbour them within their realm.
Time after time, the blind arrogance of the Spaniard as champion of orthodoxy throughout the world, has rebounded against him in blows from which he will never recover. The Inquisition in itself established an hereditary fear of personal thinking that remains the stumbling-block in the way of Spanish progress to this day. Too, the natural indolence of the people inclines them to accept without question the statements and standards handed down from their directors in Church or State.
Some of these are so absurd as to call for pity rather than exasperation on the part of outsiders. For example, the conviction of even educated Spaniards with regard to the recent war with the United States is that the latter won because they sent out every man they had; while Spain was too indifferent to the petty issues involved to go to the expense of mustering troops! Half the nation has no idea what those issues were, nor of the outcome of the various battles fought over them; indeed, so distorted were the accounts of the newspapers and the governmental reports that Admiral Cervera was welcomed home to Spain with as much enthusiasm, if not as much ceremony, as was Admiral Dewey to America!
The few insignificant changes in the map, resulting from that war, the Spaniard tells you seriously, came from foul play on the part of “los Yankees.” That the stubborn ignorance and meagre resources of his own countrymen had anything to do with it he would scout with utter scorn. And this, not from a real and intense spirit of patriotism, but because he is forever looking back over his shoulder at the glories of the past; until they are actually in his mind the facts of the present.
There is little intelligent patriotism throughout Spain, the local partisan spirit of old feudalism taking its place. Thus Castilians look down on Andalucians; Andalucians show a bland pity for Aragonese; Catalonians hate and are hated by every other tribe in the country; while the Basques coolly continue tothis day to declare that they are not Spaniards, but a race unto themselves.
The extraordinary oath with which they accept each king, on his accession, is luminous: “We who are as good as you, and who are more powerful than you, elect you king, that you may protect our rights and liberties.” It scarcely expresses a loyalty with which to cement provinces into a united kingdom! But it must be remembered that the monarchs of the past have made a scare-crow of loyalty, with their draining wars for personal aggrandizement, and the terrible persecutions of their religious bigotry. The people themselves are far from being to blame for their lack of patriotism, or the mediæval superstition which with them takes the place of intelligent faith.
Catholics of other countries are revolted by what they see in their churches in Spain. The shrine of one famous Virgin is hung with wax models of arms and legs, purchased by devotees praying relief from suffering in these members. Childless women have added to the collection small wax dolls; also braids of their own hair, sacrificed to hang in the gruesome row beside the altar. Looking at these things, hearing the fantastic stories told (and firmly believed) about them, one can with difficulty realize that one is in a Christian country of the twentieth century.
On the other hand, there is a respect shown religion, and the mysteries of life and death, which is impressive in this callous age of materialism. Spanish women invariably cross themselves when passing a church—whether on foot or in a tram or carriage;and every man, grandee or peasant, uncovers while a funeral procession goes by. I have noticed this especially on days of the big bull-fights, when the trams are packed to the doors; not a man, whatever his excitement over the approachingcorrida, or his momentary interest in his neighbour, omits the instinctive gesture of respect when a hearse passes.
Which, alas, it does very often in Madrid; pathetically often, bearing the small casket of a child. It is said that a Spaniard, once grown to maturity, lives forever; but the mothers consider themselves fortunate if they save only half of their many children to manhood or womanhood. This is so literally true that one woman who had had sixteen said to me quite triumphantly, “and eight are alive! And my sister, who had fourteen, now has seven.”
One has not to search far for the cause of this terrible mortality. In the first place, it is a case of inbreeding; no new blood having come into the country since the Jews and Moors left it. In the second, the simplest laws of personal or public hygiene are unheard-of. Even among the lower middle class, for a mother to nurse her child is a disgrace not to be endured; and the peasant women to whom this duty is entrusted are appallingly ignorant, and often of filthy personal habits. From its birth, a baby is given everything it cries for—or is supposed to cry for; including cheese, pieces of meat with rice, oranges, fried potatoes, and sweetmeats of every description.
This applies not only to the poorer classes but to people of supposed education and enlightenment.When the child is two or three years old, it comes to the table with the family; though the hours of Spanish meals are injudicious even for grown persons. The early cup of chocolate is had generally about ten or eleven; luncheon is at half after one, dinner between half after eight and nine. When this is over, the parents take the children to walk in the streets, or to the stifling air and lurid entertainment of the cinema. They all go to bed about midnight, or later; and the parents cannot understand why, under such a régime, the children should have the nerves and waxen whiteness of little old men and women. Until I went to Spain, I had always considered the French child the most ill-treated in the world; but I now look upon his upbringing as positively model, compared with the ignorance and hygienic outrage visited upon the poor littleespañol.
Yet no people love their children more passionately, or sacrifice for them more heroically, than do the Spaniards. It is simply that in the laws of health, as in everything, their conception is that of by-gone centuries. In railway carriages, trams, restaurants and cafés they sit through the hottest months of summer with every door and window tight shut. More than once on the train, I have been obliged to stand in the corridor all day, because my five carriage-companions insisted on sealing themselves for ten hours or more within an airless compartment eight feet square. Even in their own carriages on the Castellana, the Madrileños drive upand down in the months of July and August with the windows entirely closed.
One does not wonder at their being a pale and listless race, attacked by all manner of disease.
It must be remembered throughout this discussion that we are dealing with the general mass of the people; though with the mass drawn from all classes. There is in Madrid the same ultra-smart set (augmented largely by wealthy South Americans), the same set oflittérateursand artists, the same set of charming and distinguished cosmopolitans, that one finds in every big city. But, in the Spanish capital, these shining exceptions are so far in the minority as to have very limited power to leaven the mental stodginess of society as a whole.
The King and Queen, by their open fondness for foreigners, and (quite naturally) for the English in particular, have set the fashion for the Anglo-mania that rules a certain portion of the aristocracy. As in Paris, a number of English words are currently used, but with a pronunciation apt to make the polite Anglo-Saxon’s lip twitch at times. The “Boy Scoots,” for example, are a favourite topic of conversation in progressive drawing-rooms; while the young bloods are wont to declare themselves, eagerly, keen for good “spor” and “the unt.” In the English Tea Rooms—always crowded with Spaniards—I have even been gravely corrected for my pronunciation of “scones.” “The señora meansthconais,” says the little waiter, in gentle Castilian.
ManyMadrileñosaffect English tailoring,though the results are a bit startling as a rule. Brown and green, in their most emphatic shades, vie with one another for popularity; and checks or stripes seen on a Spanish Brummelarechecks or stripes—no indecision on the part of the pattern. Women, of course, lean to Paris for their fashions; but Paris is too subtle for them, and they copy her creations in colours frankly strident. Orange and cerise, bright blue and royal purple share the señora’s favour; while, to be really anélégante, her hair must be tinted yellow, her face a somewhat ghastly white.
An interesting variation of conventional feminine standards is this tendency of the chicMadrileñato appear like a French cocotte; while the women of the demi-monde themselves are demurely garbed in black, without make-up, without pretension of any sort. But all women, to be desirable, must be fat. Not merely plump, as Anglo-Saxons understand the word, but distinctly on the ample side ofembonpoint. The only obesity cures in Spain are for men; women, including actresses, professional beauties, and even dancers, live to put on flesh.
One explanation of this curious and, to our taste, most unæsthetic idea of feminine beauty is its being another of those relics of Orientalism—constantly cropping up in the study of the Spanish character. I often wonder, when I see a slender Spanish girl, if she will ever be driven to the extremity of the “Slim Princess” of musical comedy fame; who, when all else failed, filled her frock with bolsters, and hercheeks with marshmallows, and then—unfortunately—sneezed.
If you told that story to a Madrileño, he would answer seriously, “Oh, but no Spanish girl would ever think of such a foolish thing.” I am sure, on second thoughts, that she would not. That is, in fact, of all Spanish faults the gravest: they never, never think of foolish things. Only the King dares laugh at himself, and at the weighty affairs of his family. Last year, just after the publication of the memoirs of a certain royal lady of the house, and the high scandal that ensued, a new little infanta was born. In presenting her to his ministers on the traditional gold platter, the King said with his dry grin: “I have already told her she is never to write a book!”
Speaking generally, however, the Spanish sense of humour is not over-acute. I doubt, for instance, if any other people could solemnly arrange and carry out a bullfight for the benefit of the S. P. C. A. Yet this actually occurred in Madrid a few years ago; and, the Madrileños will tell you with much pride, though the seats were much dearer than at other bull-fights,every onewas filled by some patron of the noble cause!
Like all people of prodigious dignity, the old actor never sees the funny side of his own performance. He will go off into gales of laughter over the mere shape of a foreigner’s hat; but, himself, says and does the most absurd things without the slightest jolt to his personal soberness. An English lady in Madrid told me of a case in point: she was visiting one ofthe unique foundling-convents of Spain, where superfluous babies may be placed in an open basket in the convent wall; the bell that is rung swinging the basket inside at the same time. My friend was trying to learn more of this highly practical institution, but the nuns whom she questioned were so overwhelmed with amusement at her boots, they could only look at her and giggle.
Finally, in despair, she concluded, “Well, at least tell me how many children are brought to you a year!”
By supreme effort, one of the sisters recovered her gravity. “We receive about half a baby a day, señora,” she said, sedately, and could not understand why the lady smiled!
That continual rudeness in the matter of staring and laughing at strangers was at first a great surprise to me—who had always heard of the extravagant politeness of the Spaniard. I came to know that he is polite only along circumscribed lines—until he knows you. After that, I believe that you could take him at the literal words of his lavish offers, and burn his house or dismantle it entirely without protest on his part. Though too poor to invite you to a meal, he will call at your hotel twice a day to leave flowers from his garden, and declare himself at your disposition; or to take you to drive in the Castellana. He will go to any amount of trouble to prepare small surprises for you: a box of sweets, that he has made especially; a bit of majolica he has heard you admire; an old fan that is an heirloom of his family: every daythere is something new, some further token of his friendship and thought.
It is true that, even when able to afford it, he shows an Eastern exclusiveness about inviting you to his house. I know people who have lived in Madrid seventeen years without having been once inside the doors of some of their Spanish friends. But this is racial habit: the old Oriental tradition of the home being sacred to the family itself: not personal slight, or snobbishness. There is in it, however, a certain caution which offends the franker hospitality of the Anglo-Saxon. To go into petty detail, I for one have never been able to overcome my resentment of the brass peep-holes (in every Spanish door) through which the servant peers out at you, before he will let you in. I realize that my irritation is quite as childish as their precaution; but I cannot conquer my annoyance at the plain impudence of the thing.
The same is true of their boundless interest in one’s affairs. Peasants, shop-keepers, well-dressed ladies and gentlemen—everyone!—will gather round, to hear a simple question addressed to a policeman in the street. They take it for granted that no foreigner speaks Spanish, and when the contrary proves the case, their curiosity and amazement are increased ten-fold.
I was once in the office of a French typewriter company of Madrid, arranging to rent a machine. During the intervals in which the agent and I conversed in French he discussed my requirements, appearance, and probable profession with a postman, adelivery-boy, an officer who came in to buy pens, and the two young lady stenographers in the next room. In Spanish, of course, all this; which I, as a foreigner, could not possibly understand.
This happens over and over again, especially atpensiontables, where one gleans astounding information as to the geography and customs of one’s country (from various good Spaniards who have never left their own), until a modest request for the salt—proffered in Castilian—throws the entire company into horrified confusion. Even then, they will go on to comment most candidly to one’s face on the peculiarities and generally inferior character of one’s countrymen. But if you turn the tables ever so discreetly, they retort in triumph: “Then why have you come to Spain? If your own country pleases you, why don’t you stay there?”
Travel for amusement or education is simply outside their comprehension—naturally enough, since it is outside the possibilities of most of them today as it was in the middle ages. We have already seen their ideas of other countries to be of the most naïve. I have been seriously congratulated by Madrileños on the privilege of beholding so fine a thoroughfare as the Castellana, such splendid shops as the handful scattered along the San Geronimo, such a wonderful building as the Opera House, which they fondly believe “the most beautiful in the world.” They are generously delighted for me, that after the primitive hotels I must have known in other countries I can enjoyfor a while the magnificence of their modern “Palace.”
They, alas, are too poor to enjoy it. I think there is something almost tragic in this fact that the entire society of Madrid cannot support the very moderate charges of the one first class hotel in the city. When one thinks of the dozens of luxurious stopping-places in London, New York, and Paris—always crowded by a mob of vulgar people with their purses overflowing, it seems actually cruel that thevieille noblesseof the Spanish capital have no money for the simple establishment they admire with child-like extravagance. The old actor does so delight in pomp—of even the mildest variety; and his youthful shortsightedness has left him so pitiably unable to secure it, now in the beggardom of his old age.
Half a dozen years ago, the porter of a friend of mine in Madrid won a lottery prize of ten thousand dollars. No sooner had he come into this fabulous wealth, than he and his wife proceeded to rent a house on the Castellana, a box at the opera, another at the bull-ring; and of course the indispensable carriage and pair. The señor had his clubs and racers, the señora her jewels, and frocks from Paris; they amazed Madrid with their magnificence.
At the end of six months the ten thousand dollars were gone; and the couple went back to the porter’s lodge, where they have lived happily ever since. Could one make the last assertion of two people of any other race in the same circumstances? Certainly not of two Americans! But, of course, had they beenAmericans, they would promptly have invested the ten thousand dollars, and doubled it; in five years they would probably have been “millionaires from the West.” Not so the ingenuous Spaniards. With no thought for the morrow, they proceeded to outdo all competitors in making a gorgeous today; and, when that was done, retired without bitterness to rest on their laurels.
In all of which the good couple may have been wiser than they seem. Being true children of their race—that is, without the first instincts for “making money”—they would naturally have taken what they had won, and stretched it carefully over the remaining half century of their lives. So they could have existed in genteel poverty without working. As it was, they had their fling—such a one as to set Madrid by the ears; they are still famous for their unparalleled prodigality; and they jog along in the service to which they were born, utterly content if at the end of the day they have an hour or two in which to gloat over their one-time splendour. When I think of the enforced scrimping and soul-shrivelling calculation of the average Madrileño, I am always glad to remember two who threw their bonnets over the mill, and had what Americans call “one grand good time.”
It is impossible to conclude this cursory glance at some of the more striking of Spanish characteristics without mention of the two finest: honesty and lack of self-interest. They go hand in hand throughout this country of rock-rooted impulse, and are forever surprising one used to the modern rule of look-sharp-or-be-worsted.My first shock was in the Rastro (the old Thieves’ Market of Madrid), when an old man candidly informed me that the chain I admired was not of gold. It had every appearance of gold, and I should have bought it as such; but the shabby old salesman shook his head, and gave it to me gladly for twenty cents.
As Taine tells us, the Spanish are not practical; which endows them, among other things, with the unprofitable quality of honour. In Toledo, just as I was taking the train, I discovered that I had lost my watch. It occurred to me that I might have dropped it in the cab our party had had for a long drive that afternoon; but when the hotel proprietor telephoned to the stables, he found that the cab had not yet returned. “However,” he told me confidently, “tomorrow thecosariagoes to Madrid, and if the watch is found she can bring it to you.”
Thecosaria(literally the “thing” woman) is an institution peculiar to Spain; she goes from town to town delivering parcels, produce, and what not—in short, she is the express company. Of course I never expected to see my watch again, but before six o’clock of the following day thecosariaappeared at my door in Madrid with the article lost in Toledo—seventy miles away. The charge for her services was two pesetas (forty cents). When I suggested a reward for the coachman, she replied with amazement that it would be to insult him! I have visions of an American driver running risk of such “insult.” Hewould have been at the pawnshop, and got his ten dollars long since.
An American friend of mine who conducts a school for girls in Madrid tells of a still rarer experience. One day her butcher came to her in great distress. He had been going over his books, and he found that the price his assistant had been charging the school for soup-bones (daily delivered) was twice what it should have been. This, said he with abject regret, had been going on unknown to him since the first of the year; he therefore owed the señora nine hundred pesetas (one hundred and eighty dollars) for bones, and begged her to accept this sum on the spot, together with his profoundest apologies.
I call such experiences rare, yet they are of everyday occurrence in Spain; so that one knows it was not here that Byron said: “I never trust manners, for I once had my pocket picked by the civilest gentleman I ever met with!” In Spain, manners and morals have an original habit of walking out together; and one need not, as in other countries, fear a preponderance of the former as probable preclusion of the latter. That lack of the practical sense, which we wise analysts deplore, has its engaging side when it brings back our watch, or saves us paying a gold price for brass.
In the matter of servants, too, one is allured by a startling readiness on their part to do as much as, even more than, they are paid for. After the surly thanks and sour looks of the New York or Londonmenial for anything under a quarter, the broad smile of the Spanish for five cents is quite an episode in one’s life. The breath-taking part of it is that the smile is still forthcoming when the five cents is not; this is frightfully disturbing to one’s nicely arranged opinions of the domestic class.
But it makes living in Madrid very agreeable. Like the rest of their countrymen, servants before they know you are inclined to be suspicious, and polite only along circumscribed lines, but once they have accepted you your position in their eyes is unimpeachable, and the service they will render has no limits. This standard of judgment of a very old country: the standard, throughout all classes, of judgment of the individual for what he proves himself to be, is extremely interesting as opposed to the instantaneous judgment and unquestioning acceptance of him as he outwardly appears to be by the very young country of America. To the American it is a disgrace to serve—or, at least, to admit that he is serving; to the Spaniard it is a disgrace not to serve, with his utmost powers and grace, anyone worthy of recognition whatsoever.
Wherefore Spanish maids and men are the most loyal and devoted the world over. They will run their feet off for you all day long, and sit up half the night too if you will let them, finishing some task in which they are interested. When you are ill, they make the most thoughtful of nurses, never sparing themselves if it is to give you even a fractional amount of comfort. And to all your thanks they return a deprecating“for nothing—for nothing.” They have never heard of “an eight-hour day”; the Union of Domestic Labour would be to them a title in Chinese; yet they find life worth living. They are even—breathe it not among the moderns!—contented; still more strange, they are considered, and whenever possible spared, by their unmodern masters and mistresses.
It is the civilization of an unpractical people; a people not in terror of giving something for nothing, but eager always to give more. They are, I believe, the one people to whom money—in the human relations of life—never occurs. And so, of course, they are despised by other peoples—for their poverty, their lack of “push.” Nowadays we worship the genius of Up-To-Date: his marvellous invention, his lightning calculation and keen move; his sweating, struggling, superman’s performance, day by day—and his final triumph. We disdain the old actor of mere grandiloquence, content to dream, passive in his corner.
Yet are his childishness and self-sufficiency, even his ignorance, so much meaner than the greed and sordidness and treachery of the demigod of today? And is the inexorable activity of the modern “Napoleon of finance” so surely worth more than the attitude of the shabby old man who refused to sell brass for gold?