LETTERS FROM SPAIN.*
THERE is nothing very striking in these letters, but they express naturally, if not always simply, the surprise felt by an English lady when introduced to a new mode of life, and brought as it • La Corte: Letters from Spain, 1863 to 1806. By a Resident There. London : Saunders, Otley, and Co. 1868.
were behind the scenes of what has always appeared to her in the most romantic light. The author of these letters went to Spain full of Byron and Washington Irving. She thought the scenery would be "something wonderful." She had heard that Madrid was in Spanish estimation the capital of the world. Of course, such overstrained ideas were doomed to speedy disappointment. But we think the recoil is too great, and that the pendulum has only just reached the opposite extreme. To say that "any third-rate town in France or England would put Madrid to the blush, if indeed anything Spanish is capable of blushing," is to exalt most unduly the capa- bilities of England and France. We never heard of any third- rate town in England which had 46 Murillos and 43 Titians in its picture gallery. France, no doubt, is richer, yet even there we might fail to discover an over-abundance of such treasures. The truth is that the Resident in Spain was disappointed by the dry, parched, and dusty appearance of the whole country. After the beautiful views of the Pyrenees, which are described with a pic- turesqueness of style that is worthy of them, she came upon "a huge dusty plain, with never a vestige of a tree or green leaf to be seen—a great drab desert" This was the land of romance -and beauty to which she had looked forward. And its present appearance was the fault of the Spaniards. They have cut -down all the wood, so that Madrid, which was originally chosen as a Royal residence on account of the vast forests that surrounded it, is now an arid waste. Then, too, the Spaniards _have a way of boasting which is sure to defeat its own object. Their character is in many respects so diametrically opposed to the English character that it is not easy to do them justice. The Resident continually exclaims against their slovenliness, their disregard of time, their dirt, their ostentation, their extravagant and unmeaning politeness. She is not always to be taken literally ; we must add the grain of salt, and her book would be all the better if that grain were Attic. Yet when we have made an allowance for a little exaggeration, for a too colloquial style, and for some insular views, we have done all that is necessary, and we may then turn to the book for much that is novel and .amusing.
The first thing that strikes an English lady in all foreign countries is the absence of neatness, and of that domestic privacy which some of us carry to an excess. It is nothing to us that foreigners do not feel the want as we do, that there is nothing incongruous to the Spaniard in the mixture of pomp and squalor, -which the English Resident finds so repulsive. It may seem -strange to us that the courtyard of the Palace at Madrid should be worse paved than any sts.bleyard in a dilapidated house in England, and that heaps of rubbish should be left in full view of the Queen's windows. So, too, when we hear of the family wash hanging out to dry over the drawing-room balcony of the hand- somest houses in Madrid, we are struck by a painful sense of the scandal such a sight would cause in London. The writer of these letters saw a bright yellow flannel petticoat waving out of the window of a duke's palace, and her profane imagination leads her to speculate on the possibility of such a display in &mit of Apsley House. But surely the fact that people can appreciate splendour does not entitle us to demand that they shall be tidy. We may com- ment as much as we like on their disregard of a standard which is so much higher than theirs, and may hold up to their admiration our subdued purity of taste and our perfect manners. When the Spanish grandees are told that on some suburban estates the hang- ing-out of wash in the gardens is expressly forbidden in every lease, they will of course have a much loftier opinion of our national life, and will be cured of their own barbarisms. The sight of a decorous English courtship would teach the people of Madrid that it is highly improper for a lady to stand on her balcony and screech amorous sentences to her lover in the street, even though she is kept in countenance by others doing the same .at almost every window. It would be impossible to find two street boys in England quarrelling in the most polite style, and bandying, "Si, Seam," and "No, Sefior," while on the point of .coming to blows. The extreme civility of the Spaniards has something absurd in it, and ends by giving trouble to both parties. But what the Resident most dislikes is that this civility is a mere matter of form. The man who will not take
cup of tea until he has been pressed over and over again, who never enters or leaves a room without profuse bows, who never speaks of his house without placing it at your service, will stare at a lady in the street, elbow her off the pavement, or even accost her rudely if she is separated for a moment from her companion. The waste of time caused by eternal bowing and refusing what is ticket unless they are at the station half an hoar before the train starts, and that the great clock of the Puerta del Sol shows a different hour on each of its three faces, we can hardly wonder at the Resident's native impatience. She says that on one of her journeys they had to stop half-an-hour at a dreary little station because there was only a single line of rails; another train was due from another direction, and the telegraph was out of order. When at last they ventured to go on, they found the other train waiting for them at another small station. Half-an-hour is represented as being the legitimate pause ; but if so, why did not the other train also start at the same time? Perhaps it was detained by some such spectacle as that witnessed on the Northern Railway by a friend of the author. In that case the train had stopped for some time at a small station while the officials smoked their cigarettes together. The signal for starting had been given, and the engine had uttered its pre- liminary shriek, when—two of the porters on the platform began to fight. "Such a sight as this was not to be lost, and the train was kept back until it was over."
Of course the internal arrangement of Spanish houses is of that unpractical kind which is always apt to harass the English abroad. Windows that won't fasten, doors that won't shut, houses without fireplaces, and woodwork with chinks through which you can put your fingers, are not peculiar to Spain. When once an Englislunau moves from his hotel into lodgings, he is sure to find out that he is in the worst built house in the worst built town in the worst of all possible worlds. We must do the Resident the justice to admit that she is not given to grumbling. But she comments rather freely, and when she does break out we remember that she is a woman. Her comparison of the Moors with the Spaniards,—of splendid palaces, rich cultivation, irriga- tion works, and industry, with mud hovels, barren dusty plains, and lounging effeminacy—bears marks of feminine severity. Yet here we cannot think the censure misplaced, and in the prefer- ence shown to the Moors there is none of that obstinate adherence to an English standard which so often lessens the force of English criticism. In other places, as we have seen, the blame is too sweeping, while there is something grudging in the praise. After all we have heard against Madrid, it sounds odd that from one side at least it is "really rather pretty." Is there not something "really rather picturesque" in the street scene sketched in the following paragraph, something that every third-rate town in England cannot show ?
"The streets always look gay and lively, for they era always crowded, and there is great variety of costume. Everything has a very foreign look to untravelled me : the clumsily built carte, with their long string of six or eight mules straggling all across the road and jingling their bells ; the heavy bullock carts creeping along, with their driver, if you can call him so, walking before his beasts with a long stick over his shoulder to show them the way ; the itinerant sellers of bread, melons, grapes, &a., each with his mule-load of wares (for everything is carried in a kind of large pannier, an exaggerated carpenter's tool-basket),. filling the air with discordant cries : the women with their light veils, and the men with their cumbrous cloaks, with here and there a bull- fighter, distinguishable by his little pigtail of plaited hair ; and the fishmongers, who wear a peculiar dross—I believe that of the Asturian peasantry,—all make up a curious scene. You see also a great number of Asturian nurses in their national dress. It is not the custom, it seems, here for ladies to bring up their own children, and the wet nurses all come from Asturias. They are dressed by their mistresses, who seem to vie with each other in turning out their servants as richly as possible. The costume is very pretty. A short skirt of silk, or sometimes even velvet, generally scarlet or very bright blue, with a bodice open in front and laced across. An apron of black and silver, or black and gold, tied behind with a bow and long ends ; a coloured silk handkerchief over the head, from under which the hair hangs in two long plaits below the waist. The skirt of the dress is generally trimmed with broad bands of velvet, sometimes edged with gold or silver, and the body, which is cut square about the throat, with innumerable little silver buttons. They wear long earrings, and a chain of silver or coral, coiled many times round their neck."
The Resident does not always show the same favour to the Spanish national costume. She thinks the Spanish cloak cumbrous, un- graceful, and horribly effeminate. She cannot imagine how the mantilla can ever have been pretty. The Spanish women are singularly tasteless in their choice of colours, and as for their hair, they pull it so far back that some of them look as if they could not shut their eyes.
Closely connected with national dress are the national amuse- ments, of which, too, so much has been written. The author of these letters did not go to a bullfight, although she tells us that English people in Spain seem almost as fond of the sight as the Spaniards themselves. Other residents apparently get over the virtuous horror to which their home life
offered may not impress people to whom the word " time " has no has accustomed them, as soon as they have seen one bullfight, meaning. If it be true that travellers are not allowed to take a I and they go to the first bullfight in obedience to the old proverb about Rome and the Romans. Our author did not go once as a duty, and therefore had not the temptation of going again as a plea- sure. But she heard a good deal of talk upon the subject, and a curious fact she tells us is that when a bull is too savage to be fought with safety a couple of tame oxen are sent into the arena to lead him out. "They place themselves one on each side of the poor tortured brute, and he walks out between them in the most amiable manner." Of the gaieties of the Madrid Carnival the account is not very lively. The amusement seemed to be of that sad order which is generally associated with English diversions. But the description of the masked balls introduces us to the Queen of Spain :—
"The Queen generally goes to one, at least, of the masked balls, but she and the ladies who attend her are now always dressed alike and in some distinctive costume, so that they are well known, and they keep together and only look on. Formerly she used to go really disguised, and mix with the rest of the revellers, taking no inactive part in the fun. They tell a story of her going about once in the disguise of an officer, with a military favourite of the day, and getting into a dispute with a watchman, which ended by her striking him. The man arrested her, and she was obliged to discover herself to avoid being led off to the police-station."
This adventure is worthy of the portly and energetic woman who, when talking to O'Donnell about the African war, exclaimed, " Ah! if I were only a man, I would go too."—" And so would I!" squeaked out the King, with as much truth as naivete:
O'Donnell is described as a tall, well-made man, with a cruelly determined mouth, a great square jaw like a prizefighter, an open brow, and excessively blue eyes that twinkle good-humouredly. The author saw him often, and did not like him. She expresses a charitable wish in one place that a firing party which shed the first blood during the Prim insurrection and under the eyes of O'Donnell had turned round and shot the old wolf himself as he sat in his carriage. But a few pages later it is said that the old wolf has not shed more blood than he could well help ; Narvaez would have fired on the people a dozen times while O'Donnell only shot three men. All which, considering that " pronunciamientos " occur oftener than twice a year, and that a Spaniard expressed his surprise at none having taken place during the first six months of our author's stay in Madrid, is a cheerful index to the political state of the country.
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